


Charcoal

by selahexanimo



Category: Leviathan - Scott Westerfeld
Genre: Established Relationship, F/F, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-28
Updated: 2014-03-28
Packaged: 2018-01-17 09:02:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1381672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/selahexanimo/pseuds/selahexanimo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Deryn is an artist. Inevitably, there must be a “draw me like your French girls” scenario.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Charcoal

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on tumblr (find it [here](http://thequeenpatches.tumblr.com/post/77498160083/submitted-by-selahexanimo-deryn-lilit-vignette)). Written for [thequeenpatches](http://thequeenpatches.tumblr.com/).

It is one of those rare and wonderful mornings when neither the lady boffin nor the head archivist of the Zoological Society require immediate assistance, leaving Deryn and Lilit free to sleep late and pretend that nothing exists outside their tiny London garret.

They get up, anyway; Lilit pads into the kitchen in her coral-colored chemise, intent on cooking. Deryn follows her in. Lilit's curls taste like cumin, against Deryn’s lips; paprika salts her skin. Deryn leans with her arms around Lilit's waist, watching her lover whisking eggs and crumbling spices with a flick of her fingers. She kisses Lilit’s neck through her sleep-touselled hair and says, "Come sit for me.”

But Lilit murmurs, "When the eggs are done.”

She is adamant about the eggs. They stuff themselves into the breakfast nook beneath the solitary window, trying not to scrape the walls as they wriggle into their chairs. The potted plants -- some alive, most dead; they forget to throw them out -- choke the windowsills and crowd their plates. Deryn's hand keeps bumping a vase of roses someone gave them ages ago; the sickly, sludgy water trembles; petals fall onto her plate.

"You're very eager, today," Lilit says.

"Aye. I wanted to try--" Deryn realizes she's got egg in her mouth halfway through her sentence; she snorts, a little embarrassed, and slaps a hand over her mouth with a, "Sorry, lass." Lilit laughs.

"The charcoal," Deryn says, when she's finished chewing. "I want to try out the charcoal."

Last week, Deryn had stumbled across a nook-and-cranny art shop she never knew existed, hiding in a part of London she thought she knew like the insides of the Leviathan. She'd made strange choking sounds, as she'd staggered inside; Alek, who had been with her, had asked if she needed a physician. She had spent a solid hour browsing the shelves and whimpering, and had left with several sticks of charcoal wrapped in paper that the store's owner had given to her out of pity. She'd only used charcoal twice before, thought it made a pure awful mess, the way it smeared and got all over everything, but she wasn't about to turn down generosity.

"What will you draw?" Lilit asks, now. "With your charcoal?"

Deryn winks. "A pretty girl."

"Flattery will get you nowhere," Lilit says, unmoved. "What sort of scene do you have in mind?"

Deryn shrugs. “No scene. Just—” She taps her fork against her lips, as she studies Lilit, and her smile grows wicked; she raises a hand, cupped as if to frame Lilit in a camera lens. “I’ve a hankering to draw you just—like—that. In your underthings.”

With her hair uncombed and her face unwashed, with spices staining her fingertips and the scent of sleep and the just awake droop of her eyes still on her. Deryn does not say this, but she might as well have, the way Lilit smiles and drops her gaze as if in answer.

Lilit threads a curl between her fingers. “Or perhaps,” she says, “you'd like to draw me in nothing at all.”

Deryn’s body thrills, to hear Lilit’s voice so low and rich, saying this; she reaches out to slide her foot up the back of Lilit’s calf. “Or that.”

Lilit takes her time with the dishes. Deryn listens to the soft slop of dishwater as she sets out her easel and digs the charcoal out of the tackle box where she keeps her supplies.

Lilit appears, patting her hands dry on a dishtowel. “Where should I sit?” she asks. Deryn points her to the vanity, with its sway-backed seat and deep cushion. The light is good, morning light; it won’t last long.

“Sit like you’re doing something,” Deryn says.

“Such as?”

Deryn shrugs. “Hell if I know.”

“But you’re the artist,” Lilit protests, as she starts to arrange herself. She pauses, then shrugs off the chemise. The silk crumples to her feet; Deryn’s breath catches.

Lilit sits back down, drapes a leg over one arm of the chair and reclines against the other. She braces her elbow on the back of the chair, catches up the chemise and dangles it from her lifted foot. “How’s this?” She flashes Deryn a smirk. “Study of a woman preparing to toss her underthings across the room.”

“Brilliant,” breathes Deryn.

It isn’t as if she hasn’t seen Lilit naked, before now, with her legs spread or her head thrown back in that voluptuous way film stars have, basking in herself, basking in the sunshine that turns her skin to copper and her hair to ink, eyes half-shut and lips parted. But Deryn cannot stop drinking her in: the sunlight bronzing Lilit’s shoulders and stomach, the fall of light between her breasts and thighs. She wonders if colored pastels will do justice to the scene, better than three sticks of charcoal. But the charcoal feels right, somehow.

She works fast and dirty; by the time she's three quarters finished her hands are sooty and she's got charcoal under her fingernails and up her arms. Lilit peeks over at her. "Are you using your face for a canvas?" she teases.

"I look that bad?" says Deryn, grinning.

"Worse."

Lilit's foot has drooped; she slumps in the chair and shuts her eyes. The sun creeps higher, shadows chasing the light up Lilit's legs. "Should we go out for lunch?" she asks, after a while.

There's a tricky bit, in these final stages, trying to bring out the light in Lilit's hair with a dull, black eraser, the cleanest one Deryn can find. It takes her a long moment to answer. "We'll do dinner. You know Newkirk's on leave? I thought we'd meet him and Alek at the pub, have a bite there."

"Will your drawing be finished by then?"

Another long pause. "It's pretty much done now."

It's not quite done; the perfectionist in Deryn twitches over the errors she keeps spotting: the fingerprint smudge on Lilit's cheek, the unconvincing slant of Lilit's body against the chair, the horror the eraser has wrecked on the fringes of Lilit's curls. But another part of Deryn goes bright and hot with anticipation when her lover stands and starts over; she has managed to catch something of Lilit's smile and half-lidded eyes, the elegance of her arm and shoulder, draped with such nonchalance over the chair's back. She has drawn something that is essentially right at first go. (Not technically right, maybe, but essentially. And this is why she chose the charcoal, in the end; it is messy and imprecise and so manages to convey what she has never quite managed to with ink or pencils. Maybe it's just beginner's luck, but she likes the result -- she loves it -- she wants Lilit to see it and understand it and love it too.)

Deryn has a moment of misgiving when Lilit comes around to the easel. She imagines that Lilit will not see the picture that she does; she's afraid Lilit will not like it.

"It's--" she begins, reaching for an apology (which Deryn Sharp does not do, as a rule, but rules do not apply to first times). "It's a bit... shoddy--"

"Ssh." Lilit presses her fingers to Deryn's lips. "Let me look."

She leans down, resting her chin on Deryn's head. Deryn lets out a breath she doesn't know she was holding; she tries to relax and lean into the gentle rise and fall of Lilit's breathing. Lilit's hand goes slack; her fingers drift up and down Deryn's jaw.

"I will always want to know how you do that," she says, at last. "How you get so much down with just a few strokes, how you--" Her fingers curl, and she gives a little, frustrated huff, as if her words are failing her. "It's almost like a photograph. Because the way you draw is so very truthful -- but it's more truthful even than that, because it isn't... stark, like a photograph can be, it isn't just plain fact, it's--" Her fingers curl again, a little more forcefully. "I don't know." And suddenly her voice is small and a little helpless; Deryn tilts back her head, startled, and meets Lilit's eyes.

"Is all that a good thing?" she asks, bewildered.

Lilit buries her face in the crook of Deryn's collarbone; Deryn can feel the shape of her smile. "Sometimes," Lilit says, "I think you draw me better than I am."

Deryn starts to protest -- she draws what she sees; she's not like Newkirk, filling the margins of his graphing paper with sloppy doodles and then wondering why Mr. Rigby gives him hell. Deryn doesn't fabricate. She draws what's barking there.

"It's beautiful," says Lilit. "You've drawn me so beautifully."

She lifts her head and leans in to kiss Deryn, still smiling; she tastes like cumin and paprika, and the savor of her lips is enough to melt all of Deryn's protests away.


End file.
